On Wednesday, Sports Illustrated rolled out its “Twitter 100,” a list of athletes, news outlets, and media personalities that Joe Sportsfan should follow on the popular social network. Large media outlets regularly do this — see also: TIME’s 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013, Business Insider’s 100 Tech People You Have to Follow on Twitter, The Wired 100 — and then smaller outlets make counter-lists, and everybody retweets and shares and talks about it on Twitter. Nobody says, “Hey, are we seriously using this medium to talk about a frivolous and subjective list of who uses this medium the best?”

It’s bullshit. FUCK best-of Twitter lists.

In case you’re unfamiliar with how this farce works, here’s a step-by-step breakdown:

Media outlet honors select Twitter users who have 20,000 followers. Or 75,000. Or 500,000. Or a million.

Those users, flattered by the selection, tweet the link to their army of followers.

Media outlet enjoys increased traffic to the collation that required far less work than making original content.

That simple process can mutate, too. In SI’s case, it went the extra mile to service those it had serviced: in the first nine hours after its list was published, SI retweeted THIRTY of the “Golly, look who got selected for SI’s list” tweets outlined in Step 2. More impressively, SI savvily got a luxury car brand to sponsor its shiny listicle. I’m hardly against sponsored content online — it regularly pays my bills, and I’ve happily dropped Applebee’s mentions into videos for the last month — but the naked capitalism stamped on this salt lick of media consumption feels too blatant even for my permissive tastes.

Best-of-Twitter lists are not a service to readers or Twitter users; they’re cynical clickbait garbage, and the same people who mock and shame Bleacher Report’s SEO-gamed lists and BuzzFeed’s nihilistic, micro-targeted “demolisticles” will happily share a best-of-Twitter list if they happen to be on it. The honorees can hardly be faulted here — except, perhaps, for naïveté — because it’s natural to thank the parties responsible for the warm feeling you get from recognition. That’s what makes best-of-Twitters list so pernicious: the esteem of a major outlet and the gratitude of respected voices cloud the fact that it’s just a media circle jerk.

There is an obvious counterpoint here: that I, a low-level sports media personality, have sour grapes about not being named to the list. It’s an easy straw man, and it will burn hotter with the little bit of timber in there: I have not, to my knowledge, ever been named to a best-of-Twitter list — not even to the tongue-in-cheek one published by the sports blog I founded. You, fair citizen, will simply have to take me at my word that I do not give a teaspoon of shit about not being named to an arbitrary list of people sending bursts of text to the internet. Or don’t. I will live either way. (UPDATE: Since writing this, I was named to a list of snubs. It doesn’t change the way I feel about all this. It’s still gross.)

Twitter is incredibly useful. I love that it’s revolutionized the media, and that it’s flexible enough to be different things to people with different interests — news, sports, humor, music, anything. But it can also be an echo chamber, where everyone you follow has X opinion about Y subject, thus cementing your certainty that opinion X is Truth. It shrinks the world down to what you want to see of it. In reality, one in five Americans don’t use the Internet. Facebook is far more useful in driving traffic. Nobody gives a shit which famous person blocked you. Twitter is excellent for breaking news and sharing information, but it’s still just a tiny-ass fraction of the communicating world.

So let’s all collectively dial it the fuck back on TWITTER USERS YOU MUST FOLLOW. You don’t have to follow anyone. You don’t have to be on Twitter. And you sure as shit don’t need to click on a list of Twitter accounts curated NOT for your interests, but for a media outlet’s profits. You know People’s “World’s Most Beautiful” list? It’s made up of the stars who were available for a photo shoot, and it’s still less offensive and nakedly self-serving than lists of Twitter accounts you should follow.

Follow who you want, and share the things you like. Fuck Twitter lists.

A couple of my friends do it, but I am pretty sure they’re doing it sarcastically. I also assume they are because I like them a lot and I would hate to have to end my friendship with them. I am guilty of using HAM and YOLO sarcastically and getting a little bit too comfortable with it.

I actually do have a friend who unironically uses hastags in face to face conversation. Needless to say, we don’t hang out with this fuck anymore. I’m not sure whether the hastags corrupted his soul or if he just became a douche and then started using them. Either way, fuck that guy

I should also say that I’ve noticed it becoming more and more of a thing. I’ll sometimes go back to my fraternity for a visit (wooooooooooo HAZE BALLS) and I noticed that a lot of the younger guys use them with alarming regularity. Luckily I’m a 20-something who doesn’t, so I get to be all drunk on smug hipsterness

So I saw that list and saw Amanda McCarty on it. I like Brandon McCarthy on Twitter. So I followed her. Her first tweet was thanking SI for new followers. Her second tweet was about how exhausted she was leaving the house from 8 – 4. Immediate unfollow. Serves me right for listening to SI.

My friend’s sister is on Twitter and she now has an infant at home. Her feed is basically all the shit that nobody cares about rolled into one inconvenient string of bursts throughout the day. It’s exactly what Twitter shouldn’t be but somehow is.

I love the Gruden Grinder series, but I couldn’t follow BBW. He tweets incessantly (or at least he did that week I followed him) and it was very political. I am a lefty too, but man, keep that shit off of social media. There are already dickety billion channels dedicated to it, and my Facebook feed is full of it too. I just want to twitter to bring the funny.

Regarding this ^^ comment. That is why I like twitter for following people I don’t know personally. You can try following people for awhile, and if you don’t enjoy following them, or if they are too heavy handed for your tastes or boring or if they rub you the wrong way, you can just unfollow them. And since they are “celebrities” or whatever, they usually don’t care.

I’m an anomaly among my demographic for being relatively young and not using Twitter. I absolutely hate it. I hated the idea of people taking essentially a Facebook status and breaking it up into 3 Twitter “posts”. On the flip side, Twitter is an incredibly powerful medium for getting news and for companies to market to you. Once you figure out how businesses are trying to market to you by doing the things that Matt described your opinion changes though. I worked at a company that had a social media deal with SB Nation and it was a huge traffic driver, but at the same time it is a huge disservice to a bloggers’ fans to get into that kind of partnership.

I use Twitter for two things :
1) Something to look at on the bus when I’m already caught up on everything else
2) A safe place to be “amusing” while drunk, as no family/professional acquaintances follow me on twitter, and it’s not a public account

I only use twitter to keep up on news I don’t have time for during the day and to get hot sports taeks from all of the #NFL #Insiders (Not Mort). Also I’ve been lucky enough to get followed by a few of my hip-hop idols so I’m cool with that.

I’m increasingly convinced that Twitter’s primary value is as a venue for character-driven humor. PFTCommenter’s strong taeks are but one example; wise_kaplan will suddenly strike out on bizarre, hilarious narratives that play out over days. So there’s some wheat amongst the abundant chaff.

@packman Holy hell, I love that example. If only it were Cam Newton or RGIII in place of Rodgers, it would be the Strongest of All Possible Taeks.
@cuntler Absolutely. A real masterpiece. “I could drink, like, a thousand beers tonight, you guys” is part of the lexicon.
Also, TNG_S8. Not as active now, and niche material, but occasionally public-spectacle-howling-with-laughter funny.

@Coffee_dad is a good “wait for it” follow. 99 of 100 tweets are basically “drinking coffee” or “getting coffee”, but the 100th tweet is always something profound, like “do you know what my son is being for halloween? a ghost, because he decided to drink and drive.”

It’s also fair to mention @cranky_kaplan, since I invoked his alter ego, @wise_kaplan earlier. I significantly prefer @wise_kaplan, though, because of tweets like this, which hits pretty close to home:
“All day long I taught the summer interns (dumb college kids) how to carry themselves. How to think. And now? Now I am fucking drunk.”

I’m with Cuntler. There’s a ton of assholes on Twitter, but there’s a lot of assholes in the real world. And guess what? You can ignore them, just like in real life. And the guys that make it worthwhile as a follow

I really enjoy the occasional athlete’s personal life glimpse you get almost exclusively from twitter, but as I mostly only follow Bears & Wild (nhl) players, i’m not sure if I’m missing anyone awesome.

Hockey players are usually a fun follow. Instead of the mundane “RISE N GRIND” or “WE WORKIN” crap football players endless spew, hockey players tend to take humorous shots at each other, post photos of practices, or, in the case of Evgeni Malkin, post something unintelligible in broken English.

In an even weirder twist, pro golfers can be good follows, too. Jason Dufner, Keegan Bradley, and Rickie Fowler all occasionally get into fake flame wars with each other, often to the confusion of followers.